The ship is sinking! But people are getting on lifeboats! He tries to reach one, then another, in time, but he doesn’t make it; few men from steerage will. Minutes turn to an hour, then two. In the end, de Mulder watches as the last lifeboat is lowered to the water below.
The ship tilts, and desperate hands reach out, struggling to grab for anything they can to break their fall. Some hands make contact with something they hope will save them—pieces of the broken ship, deck furniture—anything that will float. Others only scratch air. De Mulder grabs onto a wooden deck chair. And the ship sinks, along with its passengers, including him.
The night wears on. Debris bobs on the ocean’s surface. So do bodies. Hundreds of them, dead within minutes from hypothermia, heart failure, or injuries sustained from the fall.
But de Mulder survives—by clinging to his deck chair in the freezing water.
Serendipitously, he floats close enough to one of the Titanic’s twenty lifeboats to cry for help—and be heard. Its passengers pull him to safety.
Four days later, Theodor de Mulder reaches his destination: the promised land of America. He’s one of the lucky ones.
The RMS Titanic was more than 880 feet (268m) long and weighed more than 46,000 tons.
THE TITANIC WAS THE LARGEST and most luxurious steamship ever built.
The ship’s builders, the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, designed the ship with safety in mind. They divided the hull into fifteen watertight bulkheads, the theory being that if a collision occurred and even two compartments flooded, the ship could still float. Harland and Wolff claimed that the ship’s cutting-edge system of watertight bulkheads made it “virtually unsinkable.”
For its first-class passengers, its owners marketed the luxury experience more than the journey itself. The ship’s promotional materials described its opulent decor, extensive recreational facilities, and modern technology, including ship-wide electric lighting and Marconi wireless communication equipment. First-class passengers had use of a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a squash court, a library, and a Turkish bath, as well as a variety of dining rooms, bars, and restaurants. The most expensive ticket cost $4,246 one way, roughly $92,000 today, for a suite that included a sitting room, two bedrooms, two dressing rooms, a private bath, and a private deck for enjoying the sea air.
Not everyone on the Titanic traveled first class. Second-class facilities were still deluxe, surpassing those of the first-class facilities on most rival liners.
More than half of the Titanic’s passengers were traveling steerage: 710 people from all over the world, including eight Chinese, on their way to a new life in America. Thanks to the owners’ preference for comfort over speed, the Titanic offered the highest standard of third-class accommodations of its time. Most of the four decks of steerage were made up of small cabins intended for two to four passengers. Every room had running water—a luxury many of the steerage-class passengers would not have enjoyed at home—though there were only two baths for third class. And the only public rooms for steerage passengers, were a general room, paneled in whitewashed pine and furnished with sturdy teak benches, table, and chairs; a smoking room and bar; and a large dining saloon.
The voyage was scheduled to take just over a week, but the owner and captain hoped to make the ship’s maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York in record time.
The Titanic had been at sea for four days when telegraph operator Jack Phillips received the first of nine messages from other ships, warning them of ice fields ahead. He posted the reports on the message center so Captain Edward Smith and other crew members could see them and take action. Captain Smith decided to continue, adjusting his course to the south—a decision that would sink the world’s greatest steamliner and cost hundreds of lives.
The night was clear and bitter cold. The sea was calm. Lookouts in the crow’s nests were told to watch for icebergs as a routine precaution. At 11:40 that evening, two hours after the first iceberg warning came through, lookout Frederick Fleet spotted an iceberg. He hit the warning bell three times—the signal for danger ahead—and called an urgent message to the bridge. It was too late. The crew could not turn the massive ship fast enough to avoid the iceberg. The iceberg buckled the hull, ripping open the three forward holds. Two boiler rooms were exposed to the sea. The pumps could expel two thousand tons of water per hour; that amount poured into the Titanic every five minutes.
At 12:05, twenty-five minutes after the collision, Captain Smith realized the extent of the damage and ordered the crew to prepare to abandon ship. For the next two hours, the ship was in total confusion. There had been no lifeboat drill since the ship left Southampton. Neither passengers nor crew knew where to go or what to do. Lifeboats were loaded with less than their full passenger load because crew members did not know they could be lowered at full capacity. Some passengers refused to get in lifeboats because they thought they would be safer on deck. Many had failed to grab their life jackets from their cabins.
lat 42 N to 41.25 N, long 49 W to 50.3 W saw much heavy pack ice and great number of large icebergs also field ice. Weather good, clear.
—Ice report from the SS Mesaba
Telegraph officers Harold Bride and Jack Phillips sent out distress calls to all ships: CQD CQD SOS Titanic Position 41.44N 50.24W Require immediate assistance. Come at once. We struck an iceberg. Sinking. Bride and Phillips couldn’t be sure that anyone would respond. Wireless telegraphy was less than fifteen years old. Few ships carried radios; those that did used them primarily to send personal and business messages. No protocols existed for their use.
One ship was only twenty miles away, but its radio operator had turned off his wireless for the night. The passenger ship Carpathia, fifty-eight miles south of the sinking Titanic, heard the wireless SOS and responded. It took more than four hours for the ship to rescue some seven hundred people from the scattered lifeboats.
Designed to be unsinkable, the Titanic hit the seabed in less than three hours.
MORSE CODE AND SOS
Long before Samuel Morse invented Morse code in 1838, people were sending long-distance messages using code. Their ways and means may have differed—African talking drums, Native American smoke signals, military bugle calls, semaphore—but all broke messages down into coded signals.
Morse code uses the same idea to send messages by telegraph. Each letter of a word is represented by a series of short or long signals. The most frequently used letters use the fewest number of signals.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, operators of the Marconi wireless used Morse code to send the first radio distress signal: CQD—come quick danger. In 1906, the International Radio Telegraphic Convention created a new signal, SOS, which was simpler to transmit in Morse code. But humans are creatures of habit, and radio operators continued to use the old signal. The Titanic disaster was the first time SOS was used by an endangered ship. After the Titanic, SOS became the standard international distress signal. Commonly believed to mean “save our ship,” the three-letter signal was chosen solely because it is easy to remember and enter.
Wireless operator and survivor, Harold Bride, at work in Marconi Room on RMS Titanic.
Titanic distress call received by steamship SS Burma at 11.50 p.m.
FROM THE MOMENT THE FIRST artist painted a bison on a cave wall, humans have sought better ways to communicate. Cuneiform, Gutenberg’s movable type, the knotted string of the Incan quipu, signal flags on the mast of a ship, and lamps in a lighthouse all served the same purpose: allowing one person to share information with another.
In the nineteenth century, mankind began to learn more about the energy force called electricity. Samuel Morse was the first to harness it as a means of carrying communication. His telegraph sent messages using electromagnetic currents flowing over a wire. Messages were coded with strokes of a single key. When the key was pressed down, current flowed along a wire: the dots and dashes of Morse code created by the length of time the operato
r held down the key. At the other end of the wire, the electrical impulses were translated into long and short clicks or printed on a Morse writer as dots and dashes for the operator to decode.
Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi was only thirty-five when he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his work in wireless telegraphy in 1909.
Morse telegraphs spread as quickly as men could string wire. Between 1843, when Congress approved the first telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, and Morse’s death in 1872, the Western Union Company had strung almost 250,000 miles of telegraph wire across the United States, and the continents were linked by 100,000 miles of undersea cable.
The telephone Alexander Graham Bell introduced to the world in 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia also used electromagnetic currents to transmit sound. In fact, Bell described the device as a “harmonic telegraph.”
The telephone and the telegraph both provided instant communication over long distances, something that was believed to be impossible only fifty years before. Both methods required wires and had a limited range. Ships at sea could not contact people on land. Most experts scoffed at the idea that messages could travel long distances without wires. Some believed that signals would simply disappear into space because electromagnetic waves travel in a straight line and the earth is round. Others argued that it was impossible to generate sufficient power to create electromagnetic waves that were long enough to travel over distances.
Guglielmo Marconi proved them wrong. While still in his twenties, he pioneered a practical method of sending messages at the speed of light across thousands of miles, without wires or other physical connection between sender and receiver.
Marconi began working on wireless telegraphy in 1894 after reading about Heinrich Hertz’s work with long wavelength electromagnetic radiation. Hertz had proved that electromagnetism, the combined force of electricity and magnetism, existed as an invisible disturbance in the air, a vibration that moved in waves, like visible light and audible sound. At first known as Hertzian electromagnetic waves, we now know them as “radio waves.”
THE IONOSPHERE
Like medieval sailors, who thought they would sail off the edge of the earth when they reached the horizon, many scientists at the end of the nineteenth century expected electromagnetic waves to travel straight out to space when they passed the earth’s horizon. Obviously that didn’t happen. No one knew why until more than twenty years after Marconi’s first transatlantic transmission. In 1924, British physicist Edward Appleton discovered the ionosphere, a wave of electrically charged particles produced by the sun’s radiation. This electrified layer sixty-two miles above the earth’s surface reflects radio waves back to earth, where they then bounce back to the ionosphere. This process continues until the radio wave loses its energy.
Over the next six years, Marconi built equipment that could transmit electrical signals without wires, beginning with an apparatus similar to that used by Hertz and a Morse signaling key. His first success came when he sent a signal nine yards across the room in his home laboratory. Soon he was sending messages across a mile-wide field, then across the English Channel. On December 12, 1901, he sent the first message across the Atlantic, using an aerial attached to a kite at the end of a six-hundred-foot wire.
By 1909, all the major naval forces in the world and three hundred merchant ships and liners had wireless devices on board, but they were used mainly to carry the news and allow passengers to send personal and business messages. The 1912 Titanic disaster illustrated all too clearly the value of the radio when a ship is in trouble. Three months after the Titanic sank, new international regulations required every oceangoing ship to carry a working wireless and keep it powered at all times.
THE SAME TECHNOLOGY THAT saved lives on the open seas was adapted for entertainment in the 1920s. Radio broadcasts began with news and music in the 1920s; over the next thirty years, programming expanded to include interviews, speeches, variety shows, and the dramas that took the name “soap operas” from their commercial sponsors. By 1924, 2.5 million radio sets tuned in to more than six hundred broadcast stations in the United States alone.
Today, the effects of Marconi’s wireless technology are everywhere: automatic garage door openers, GPS systems, satellite communications, radio telescopes, mobile phones, wireless Internet, and the growing array of tablets, readers, and other devices that depend on wireless communication. The more we unplug, the more plugged in we become.
BY THE BEGINNING OF THE First World War, humans had made giant strides in the battle against our oldest and most deadly enemies—bacteria. English surgeon Joseph Lister had pioneered the use of antiseptics in surgery. French scientist Louis Pasteur and others had identified germs as the cause of diseases like cholera, tetanus, diptheria, and pneumonia. Austrian physician Ignaz Semmelweis had reduced the number of deaths from so-called “childbed fever” by a factor of twenty with the simple—and controversial—suggestion that doctors wash their hands before delivering a baby. Despite these advances, germ theory wasn’t universally accepted by doctors—and even those who believed in it had no way to treat bacteria-caused infections. Scientists had identified bacteria as the enemy, but had not yet found a weapon against it.
Dr. Alexander Fleming was one of those who had wholeheartedly accepted germ theory. When the war began, Fleming was a young doctor and researcher in Sir Almroth Wright’s inoculation department at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Soon after England entered the war, Wright volunteered the services of his entire staff to vaccinate British soldiers against typhoid and to run a wound treatment and research center in France.
While treating battlefield wounds, Fleming saw thousands of wounded soldiers die from tetanus, blood poisoning, and gangrene—just as they had since humans first went to war. He quickly realized that Lister’s antiseptic methods, which worked reasonably well in the controlled conditions of civilian hospitals, had almost no effect at the front. Soldiers arrived at the field hospital with massive wounds that were contaminated with dirt, feces, shreds of clothing, and shrapnel—all prime breeding grounds for the bacteria that caused infections. Fleming demonstrated that the standard method of wrapping wounds with antiseptic-soaked bandages not only failed to kill the bacteria, but damaged both the surrounding tissue and the white blood cells that are the body’s natural defense against infection. He developed a new technique for treating wounds: removing as much dead tissue as possible, then flushing the wound with a sterile saline solution, which washed away bacteria and encouraged the body to produce new white blood cells.
Scientists had identified bacteria as the enemy, but had not yet found a weapon against it.
By the end of the war, Fleming was the leading expert on wound infections. He came home from France determined to find a way to cure them. He later wrote that his experience of being surrounded by men suffering and dying from infected wounds and being powerless to help them left him “consumed by a desire to discover, after all this struggling and waiting, something which would kill those microbes.”
After the war Fleming returned to the laboratories at St. Mary’s, where he continued his research in fighting bacteria—a life he often described as “playing with microbes.” In 1928, he discovered penicillin by chance, thanks to his habit of accumulating unwashed Petri dishes on his worktable. Coming back to his lab after a vacation, he noticed that one dish of Staphylococcus bacteria was contaminated by mold. Other researchers had seen mold on Petri dishes and thrown it away without a thought. Fleming looked closer; he saw that the area surrounding the mold was free of bacteria. Excited by the possibilities, he started a fresh colony of the mold, a variety of Penicillium, in a fresh Petri dish and surrounded it with radiating stripes of bacteria that would allow him to measure the impact of the mold over time. Within a few days he could see that the mold produced liquid that killed several kinds of disease-causing bacteria. Fleming knew he had made a discovery that could change the world, but when he published his results
three months later his fellow researchers ignored them. He convinced a few research chemists to try to extract the active ingredient from what he called “mold juice.” They soon gave up when they discovered that penicillin was difficult to produce and deteriorated easily.
Fleming put his work on penicillin aside because of difficulties in growing and refining the mold from which it was made.
Time magazine named Fleming one of the hundred most important people in the twentieth century for his discovery of penicillin.
World War II and a new generation of infected battlefield wounds revived interest in Fleming’s research into penicillin. Two researchers at Oxford, Australian pathologist Howard Florey and German biochemist Ernst Chain, discovered Fleming’s 1929 paper on penicillin while studying natural antibacterial substances. Together with biochemist Norman Heatley, they found solutions for the problems of low yield and instability that had caused earlier researchers to abandon penicillin as unworkable.
By 1941, the newspapers had proclaimed penicillin a wonder drug, but production was still a problem in wartime Britain. Florey and Heatley flew to the United States to convince American companies to produce the drug on a large scale.
In 1942, the entire supply of penicillin in the United States totaled only eleven grams. By D-Day, June 6, 1944, American factories were producing enough penicillin to treat all Allied casualties. Unlike Fleming, doctors no longer had to look on hopelessly as suffering soldiers died from infected wounds.
Allied servicemen were the first to benefit from the first antibiotic. After the war, penicillin became available to civilians as well. Fleming’s “mold juice” and its younger siblings created a medical revolution. Mankind had a powerful new weapon in the battle against infectious diseases.
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